AT ORACLE: Oracle News Briefs

Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse Release 11g Unveiled

Oracle has unveiled Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse Release 11g, a free component of Oracle Fusion Middleware designed to help developers leverage their expertise in Eclipse with the comprehensive capabilities of Oracle Fusion Middleware. Key enhancements in this release include object-relational mapping (ORM), Spring, and Web services tools to help reduce development complexity for Java and database developers targeting Oracle platforms.

Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse is designed to help organizations where Eclipse is the preferred integrated development environment by providing a set of Eclipse plug-ins to help develop, deploy, and debug Java Platform, Standard Edition; Java Platform, Enterprise Edition; Spring; ORM; and Web services applications for Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Database.

“With Oracle Fusion Middleware, developers building rich enterprise applications have a broad choice of tools—from Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse to Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle Application Development Framework—all designed to allow them to leverage their current skill set for the utmost productivity,” says Ted Farrell, chief architect and senior vice president, tools and middleware, at Oracle.

Learn more about Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse Release 11g in “Plugging It In.”

Oracle Application Integration Architecture 2.3 and 2.4 Released

Oracle has extended its business process integration offerings with the releases of Oracle Application Integration Architecture 2.3 and 2.4, Oracle Application Integration Architecture Foundation Pack for Communications, and new out-of-the-box Oracle Application Integration Architecture process integration packs. These products provide a complete and open way for organizations to integrate end-to-end business processes across a range of custom, Oracle, and third-party applications.

Also available, Oracle Application Integration Architecture Foundation Pack for Communications is an industry-specific set of business objects and Web services that provide the communications market with a standardized way to simplify and reduce the time to deploy cross-application business process integrations.

“The releases of Oracle Application Integration Architecture 2.3 and 2.4, Oracle Application Integration Architecture Foundation Pack for Communications, and new Oracle Application Integration Architecture process integration packs provide even further advantage for the enterprise to quickly define a given business process and then rapidly deploy a standardized composite business application that can evolve as business needs demand it,” says Jose Lazares, vice president of application development and product strategy for application integration architecture at Oracle.

Oracle Extends Product Master Data Management Capabilities

Oracle has released Oracle Product Data Quality Cleansing and Matching Server, a new offering based on the DataLens System from Oracle partner Silver Creek Systems. This product offering, available through an original equipment manufacturer agreement with Silver Creek Systems, will provide additional product master data management capabilities to Oracle Product Hub.

Did You Know?

Virtualization on Blade Servers Proves Popular

An online survey on virtualization adoption found that 44 percent of large enterprises—those with IT budgets greater than US$1 million—have implemented virtualization using blade servers, and 38 percent are in the planning stages of such a project. Less than 1 percent of large enterprises have no plans to virtualize. Cost savings and high availability are the biggest motivators, followed by energy efficiency and ease of management. Source: Blade Computing Community

Lost Notebooks Prove Costly

Lost or stolen notebook computers cost their corporate owners an average of US$49,246, according to a study of 138 incidents. The price tag reflects replacement; detection; forensics; data breach; lost intellectual property; lost productivity; and legal, consulting, and regulatory expenses. Data breach represents 80 percent of the cost. The average cost if the notebook is discovered missing the same day is US$8,950, but after more than a week the figure can reach US$115,849. Source: Cost of a Lost Notebook, a study commissioned by Intel and conducted by Ponemon Institute

CIOs Pick Top 10 Tech Investments

At companies with 100 or more employees, 7 out of 10 CIOs interviewed by phone in a January 2009 survey said their companies will invest in IT initiatives in the next 12 months. Their top priorities are information security (43 percent), virtualization (28 percent), data center efficiency (27 percent), Voice over IP (26 percent), software as a service (26 percent), green IT (20 percent), business intelligence (19 percent), social networking (18 percent), Web 2.0 (17 percent), and outsourcing (16 percent). Multiple answers were permitted; 1,400 CIOs participated in the survey. Source: Robert Half Technology

By extending Oracle Product Hub with the data quality capabilities offered by Oracle Product Data Quality Cleansing and Matching Server, Oracle enables customers to improve the accuracy, completeness, and integrity of their master product data. As a result, customers are equipped to optimize business functions such as procurement, new product introductions, channel penetration, reporting, analytics, and IT maintenance costs.

Oracle VM Management Pack Now Available

With the Oracle VM Management Pack, customers can manage their virtual environments from an application perspective, which allows them to quickly diagnose whether the root of a problem is an application component, in a virtual resource, or in a physical resource. In addition, built-in configuration management features allow administrators to easily track application relationships and analyze configuration changes.

“Two of the main roadblocks of customer adoption of virtualization technologies have been the high cost and complexity of managing virtual environments and a lack of tools to provide an application perspective,” says Richard Sarwal, senior vice president of product development for Oracle Enterprise Manager. “With added management capabilities for Oracle VM, Oracle Enterprise Manager has taken a major step forward in helping our customers drive down the cost of managing applications in virtual environments.”

JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Available Through Oracle On Demand

Oracle is now offering JD Edwards EnterpriseOne On Demand, providing hosting and management services at the Austin Data Center for the integrated suite of enterprise resource planning applications. The JD Edwards community can take advantage of Oracle On Demand’s best practices for hosting and managing Oracle technology platforms and SOA architecture to support end-to-end business processes.

Oracle On Demand, available for Oracle’s stack of technology, middleware, and applications, allows customers to adopt open source technologies including Linux and other technologies such as virtualization to drive down total cost of ownership, lower risk, and increase business impact. Customers also experience benefits faster by implementing with proven configurations and Information Technology Infrastructure Library-based processes run by Oracle experts.

“We are pleased that Oracle On Demand is making these investments in best practices and infrastructure to support JD Edwards EnterpriseOne,” says Lenley Hensarling, group vice president, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne. “This will enable our customers to take full advantage of the Oracle stack and realize the full benefits of being an Oracle customer.”

Web Locator

Oracle Gadget Wizard for Google Apps Released

Oracle has announced support for Google Apps in Oracle’s Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and has unveiled Oracle Gadget Wizard for Google Apps. Both product announcements demonstrate Oracle’s support for Google Secure Data Connector, which connects data from behind a company firewall to Web-based applications and gadgets that exist in the cloud.

Oracle’s Siebel CRM applications can interact with the Google cloud in a secure and flexible manner through Google Secure Data Connector. This opens the door to the delivery of next-generation software-as-a-service applications that do not impact existing resources and that include multitenancy support to securely access corporate data from behind firewalls.

With Oracle Gadget Wizard for Google Apps, users can build gadgets without any prior programming knowledge. This promotes the development of gadgets that leverage Siebel CRM and provides customers and partners an opportunity to build new mobile or gadget applications and quickly get new features out to customers.

“We’re excited to see Google provide an open, standards-based environment that makes it easy for developers to create new cloud-based applications that are capable of interacting in real time with Oracle’s Siebel CRM in an on-premises environment,” says Mark Woollen, vice president of social CRM at Oracle.